At Build 2023 last week, Microsoft announced Dev Home, a new developer focused app on Windows 11 PCs that will help them to set up the machine, monitor system information, and manage projects. Microsoft yesterday published a blog post highlighting all the features of this new Dev Home app. Find the details below.
Dev Home is an open-source app with an extension model. So, you can create your own customized Dev Home experience. To create an extension for Dev Home, check out the docs. In the future, Microsoft has plans to create a marketplace within Dev Home to allow developers to easily find and install extensions.
Dev Home comes with Dev Home GitHub extension by default. This extension provides GitHub widgets for the Dev Home dashboard and repo suggestions for the machine configuration tool. Microsoft is also working on creating an Azure DevOps (ADO) extension to provide similar functionality to the GitHub extension. Microsoft is also working with Xbox team to bring the public Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK) to Dev Home.
The new environment configuration tool in Dev Home will make it easy to set up your local machine as well as a remote environment like a Dev Box or GitHub Codespaces.
Other Dev Home features:
- One way to get set up using Dev Home is through the end-to-end setup flow. This flow allows you to choose repositories to clone from your GitHub account or you can simply enter a URL.
- Another option you can use for setting up your machine is WinGet’s new DSC configuration YAML files. These files can install applications, configure them, and more to help you achieve the desired state for your development environment.
- Dev Home includes a customizable dashboard with developer-focused widgets built using the Windows widget platform. Widgets we’ve shipped with this first release of Dev Home include system resource widgets with information based on your CPU, GPU, network, and memory usage. Additionally, the Dev Home GitHub extension provides GitHub widgets to display issue and pull request information based on a repository, plus issues and pull requests you’ve been mentioned in, assigned to, or have your review requested on.
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Dev Home makes it easy to set up Dev Drives, a new storage volume that uses the Resilient File System, or ReFS, and they also run performance mode for Microsoft Defender Antivirus. These modifications allow for up to a 30% performance improvement in file intensive scenarios like builds and package manager activities.
- You can download the Dev Home preview app here from Microsoft Store.
